Apple’s App Store Reaches 50 Billion Downloads

Apple is celebrating another App Store birthday and its gives away thousands of dollars for their faithful users. For more than a week, the home page or Apple.com and iTunes displayed a running ticker counting to the App Store’s 50 billionth download. According to Apple, the lucky person who will download the respective app will be rewarded with a $10,000 gift card to the App Store.

In the same time, the first user to download the first 50 after 50 billion will also receive $500 App Store gift cards. The countdown has started ticking for several days, and the number is still increasing. Some even suggest that the final countdown might end somewhere on Wednesday night or Thursday morning. If you plan to download or purchase a certain app from the App Store, now might be the right time to start the downloading process.

During time, Apple has accustomed its users to certain milestone moments. For example, in April 2009, the App Store reached one billion download in less than two years of existence. Apple’s Store reached 10 billion mark in January 20122, 25 billion downloads in February 2012 and now it heading to the 50 billion limit.

Apple developers suggest the fact that more than 800 apps are being downloaded every second, which makes the ticker to run quickly with almost 1000 apps per second. In the same time, for the marketing’s sake, some app developers are using Apple’s giveaway in order to promote their own apps.

No one knows which was the first app to be downloaded from App Store on 11 July 2008, when the digital platform was launched. However, the 50 billion limit is expected to pass in a few hours, marking a huge success for the Fruit Company and the explosive spread of smartphones in the past five years.

From all App Store’s purchases, Apple received only 30% of the revenue from app customers, which means that the company has received around $3.86 billion only from the App Store’s sales. In the same time, app developers received around $9 billion revenue from the app sales. However, for developers, the growth of App Store might represent a big problem. Their existence has become even harder when the competition has increased its number. Now, it is pretty difficult to be noticed within the App Store in order to hit the charts.

For instance, Rovio, the company who has developed the famous Angry Birds game to App Store in December 2009 has reached more than 2 billion downloaded worldwide on smartphones and tablets. The 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio, who has sold the Summly app to Yahoo for an estimated £18m, represents another fortunate case.

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